Geographically Promiscuous

A good friend calls me “geographically promiscuous,” and this makes me smile because I always considered myself sort of a nomad. I spent my first decade in the Midwest, my teen years in California, my twenties in the peach state, and countless summers in New England. Just once, I wanted to be able to answer the “Where are you from?” question without a huge explanation. But instead, I usually reply with “Do you want the long version or the short?”

I’ve always been so envious of people who have roots in their hometown because I have no idea what it’s like to go home and bump into people I’ve known my whole life. I think it’s so amazing when I meet someone whose parents still live in the same house where they grew up. Mine don’t even live in the same house as they did when I graduated college. I barely even remember the house we lived in when I was in grade school.

When I came to Georgia in 2001, it was the first place I’d ever lived that didn’t pick me. I spent the first 18 years of my life moving wherever my parents told me we were going next, but once I finished school and moved to Atlanta, nobody was telling me what to do or where to be. And I’ve had the time of my life.

Just when I thought I could get used to calling this city home, I found out my husband’s job is moving us to North Carolina. Fortunately it won’t be total culture shock this time around, but it’s still scary to be starting over again. And it kills me to leave Atlanta because this is where I built a life for myself. I got my first job, bought my first condo, and met my husband in this city. I even learned how to navigate the 56 streets with the name “Peachtree” – no small feat.

It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s finally starting to hit me that I’m married. You’d think this would have occurred to me the day I agreed to love and cherish him ‘til death do us part, but this wasn’t the case. The Monday after our wedding, we were back in Atlanta living in the same condo we’d shared for nearly two years. Nothing had really changed except that now we had nicer furniture and plates that matched.

But fast forward a year, and we’re facing some pretty big changes. I guess you might say the honeymoon is over. Suddenly we’re making grown-up decisions together, and we have to look a little bit further into the future than where we’re having dinner on Saturday night. Now we get to decide where we want our kids to grow up and which area has the best schools. We also have to admit the fact that we won’t be in our twenties forever. ::Sigh::

After six years in this city, I take for granted the perks of living in a familiar place. I can drive to the gym without consulting my GPS, and I know which back roads to take when traffic is impossible. I have a dentist I can trust and a hairdresser that makes my world go ‘round. On almost any given night, I can call a friend to meet me for happy hour. This is the stuff that comes only after you hang around a place for a few years.

If there is anything I’ve learned from all my years of being geographically promiscuous, it’s that the responsibility of maintaining friendships falls predominantly on the person who does the moving. I’ve seen how geography can be a deal breaker for certain friends, but I also know I can’t take that personally. When you leave your old friends behind, their lives keep marching on as usual because they don’t have nearly as much to miss as you do. The same is true when you arrive in a new place. Most people already have lives that are moving along just fine without you, and in all the places I’ve lived, I’ve never met someone who is taking new friend applications. So this is where it gets hard, because staying in touch requires more work on my part, but meeting new people requires more effort on my part too.

When we land to North Carolina in a few months, my husband and I won’t have any friends but each other. But that’s still one more person than I knew when I moved to Georgia. And this time I get to explore my new stomping grounds with the guy who has always shown up for me, so that makes it a lot more fun. Plus, he can talk to a brick wall so meeting new people shouldn’t take too long.

I still dread the “Where are you from?” question because the answer isn’t getting any shorter. And moving is always going to be scary, no matter how you slice it. But if I look at my life as a resume, I see that I’ve held some cool positions in some pretty interesting places. As my dear friend Alice always says, we may not know where we’re going, but we’ve got some great stories about where I’ve been.